The average worker checks their email before they even get out of bed in the morning

A new survey of 2,000 employed Americans finds that about half consider themselves workaholics. Here’s why.

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Almost half of Americans consider themselves workaholics.

By

NicoleLyn Pesce

It doesn’t pay to work this hard.

Almost half (48%) of Americans consider themselves modern-day “workaholics,” according to a recent study of 2,000 employees by One Poll on behalf of the Vision Council. What’s more, the average surveyed worker puts in four hours of unpaid overtime a week, and spends another four hours just thinking about work.

Half of workers also admitted to working through lunch; one in five (22%) confessed to checking emails in the middle of the night, while more than half (58%) said they check their work email while still in bed, just after waking up. No wonder 53% of subjects confessed they were currently stressed out about work while taking the survey!

Granted, some of the world’s most famous CEOs have bragged about putting in long hours, such as Elon Musk putting in 120 hours a week at Tesla, Marissa Mayer clocking 130 hour weeks at Google, and Apple’s Tim Cook, who starts sending work emails at 4:30 a.m. And backdoor bragging about your work ethic by complaining about how busy you are — even too busy to grab coffee — has become a status symbol.

While the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reports that the average American works 38.6 hours a week, with 29% of U.S. employees reporting that they put in 45 to 59 hours, and 16% working 60-plus hours. The OECD has also found that productivity is highest when people work fewer hours, and worker output actually drops once people clock in more than 48 hours per week. Yet work-life boundaries have blurred as technology keeps many people on call 24/7.

“It’s not that there is actually more work to do — it’s that there’s no time to do it because our days have been broken up into tiny little chunks of time,” Jason Fried, the coauthor of “It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work” with David Heinemeier Hansson, told Moneyish. “Modern technology has basically ruined it for us in the sense that we’re expected to be available constantly, which means that we are expected to get back to people rapidly, which means that someone sends you an email or a text or a chat, you are expected to stop what you’re doing to respond to them. You don’t ever have a continuous block of time to work on something.”

So what happens is, even though you are putting in eight hours at the office every day, you keep getting interrupted and disrupted by dozens of emails demanding to be answered ASAP, instant messages or chats from colleagues asking to pull a specific figure or file, or the classic disruptions of hour-long meetings or conference calls, that once the work day is done, you often haven’t accomplished anything of substance because you were so busy doing these smaller, more inconsequential tasks that probably could have waited. In fact, three in four full-time employees (78%) said they could do their job in under seven hours each day if they could work uninterrupted, and almost half (45%) think they could wrap things up in just five hours or less, according to a global survey of nearly 3,000 employees across eight nations that the Workforce Institute at Kronos Incorporated published last year.

And the actual layout of many workplaces - and open offices, in particular - can make it hard for workers to concentrate due to the ringing phones and conversations happening all around them, which is why workers are going crazy over soundproof office pods.

“So now what happens is that we end up doing that work that we didn’t finish - what we are actually being paid to do - at night and on the weekends,” said Fried. “A one-hour block is not the same as four 15-minute blocks, even though that also equals an hour. When you’re multitasking and bouncing between four things, you’re not getting meaningful work done. The quality of your work is not as good.”

So what can be done? Fried suggests that workers stop making everything “urgent.” When asking a colleague for help on something -- or, when a colleague asks them for help -- clarify whether it needs to be done ASAP, or if it could wait until the end of the day, or even tomorrow. He also suggests that employers pay more attention to how efficient their employees’ workday is; for example, nixing a lot of unnecessary meetings. “I know a lot of companies can’t cut them out completely, but consider how many you’re having, and how many people are in them who are having to stop what they are doing to gather in a room for an hour to discuss something that is probably better off being written up and distributed (maybe an end of the day email) so that people can absorb the info in their own time, when there is a gap in their day,” he said.

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